Beam me up, Scotty
You know, it's kind of a shame that the biggest news of the week I have is that I completed putting together and installing a media center PC for my parents. Really, I do other things, but this seems the most noteworthy at the moment. "Scotty," as in Scotty from Star Trek, is what we've named a PC we built from the ground up to serve as an auxiliary video device for the entertainment center my folks have been building for the last six months in the living room downstairs.
To recap how this computer thing started, my dad works at Intel and every year, the company gives certain employees free CPUs. This year, my dad got a Core 2 Duo "Conroe" running at fast fast fast. Anyway, since we're all Mac people here, the CPU just kinda sat here. I got to thinking about it a month ago and wondered how expensive it would be to try to make a computer that could run the chip. After finding a $60 motherboard and a $30 DVD-ROM, the ball got rolling and soon, the parts were coming together. After weeks of testing and getting the right software together, it's finally up and running. Here are a couple photos:
Yea, I bet you haven't seen a computer look like that, have you? The case is a tiny thing; one foot by one foot by a foot-and-a-half deep with plastic windows on the two sides as well as the top that let you see inside! To make matters worse, I put as many rad lights inside as I could including 12 ultraviolet LEDs. Now, UV is rad stuff, and it makes everything inside glow bright like neon nuclear radiation. The photos just can't do it justice; they just do not pick up the unnatural purple glow this thing gives off. Anyway, the computer has a remote control device built-in so it can be controlled like a DVD player. The thing will act as a playback file server for TV shows we download off the internet as well as legitimate DVD backups of movies we own. It can also run high definition video, play the latest games, surf the web and do pretty much whatever we want to toss at it. I just think it's cool to look at in the dark. I can see now why people like to "mod" out their "rigs". It's fun to build a PC that's both functional as well as a decorative piece of art.
Scotty, beam us up!
To recap how this computer thing started, my dad works at Intel and every year, the company gives certain employees free CPUs. This year, my dad got a Core 2 Duo "Conroe" running at fast fast fast. Anyway, since we're all Mac people here, the CPU just kinda sat here. I got to thinking about it a month ago and wondered how expensive it would be to try to make a computer that could run the chip. After finding a $60 motherboard and a $30 DVD-ROM, the ball got rolling and soon, the parts were coming together. After weeks of testing and getting the right software together, it's finally up and running. Here are a couple photos:
Yea, I bet you haven't seen a computer look like that, have you? The case is a tiny thing; one foot by one foot by a foot-and-a-half deep with plastic windows on the two sides as well as the top that let you see inside! To make matters worse, I put as many rad lights inside as I could including 12 ultraviolet LEDs. Now, UV is rad stuff, and it makes everything inside glow bright like neon nuclear radiation. The photos just can't do it justice; they just do not pick up the unnatural purple glow this thing gives off. Anyway, the computer has a remote control device built-in so it can be controlled like a DVD player. The thing will act as a playback file server for TV shows we download off the internet as well as legitimate DVD backups of movies we own. It can also run high definition video, play the latest games, surf the web and do pretty much whatever we want to toss at it. I just think it's cool to look at in the dark. I can see now why people like to "mod" out their "rigs". It's fun to build a PC that's both functional as well as a decorative piece of art.
Scotty, beam us up!